Mission Planner

Mission Planner is the ground control station that the ArduPilot project maintains. Michael Oborne originally built it for the APM autopilot, and it is now released under GPL-3.0 as a C# and .NET application. Operators use it to load firmware onto flight controllers such as the Pixhawk series and to set up and tune vehicles through ArduPilot's large parameter tree. They can plan missions by clicking waypoints, geofences and rally points on Google, Bing, OpenStreetMap or custom WMS maps. It works with multirotors, fixed-wing aircraft, rovers, boats and submarines. Its mission editor includes terrain analysis and a survey grid generator, which suits mapping and inspection flights. The software also offers live telemetry, a log viewer with FFT analysis, software-in-the-loop simulation, joystick control, Python scripting and antenna tracker support. It runs locally with no cloud service. The software is free. There are no paid tiers or support contracts; help comes from the community forum and volunteer-written documentation, and donations are optional. It suits drone service providers, integrators and engineering teams that build or run ArduPilot aircraft and need deep control over the hardware. The main limitation is narrow scope. It works only with ArduPilot vehicles, not PX4, and it is native to Windows; Linux runs through Mono with reported display problems. It has no fleet management, asset records, image processing or enterprise security features, so inspection programmes need other tools for the data side.